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Purobi Menon

Chilled white wine from an Indian vineyard — just the right thing to beat the Indian summer. Meet Rajeev Samant, Founder-Managing Director, Sula Vineyards, who considers winemaking a challenging blend of art and science.

An Indian summer and alphonso mangoes? A delicious proposition. An Indian summer and chilled white wine? An unconventional, yet, better proposition. Well, that's what Rajeev Samant, Founder and Managing Director, Sula Vineyards, put his bet on in early 1997. And, today, he's reaping rich dividends not from the golden fruit but from the Dionysian drink.

But it has been a long journey for this Stanford-trained engineer, who has also worked at Oracle's headquarters in San Francisco as finance manager, before quitting in 1992, travelling for a year and heading home to his family-owned lands in 1993 to see what he could make of his own green valley.

He started off with alphonso mangoes in his 30-acre family land in Nashik, on the banks of the Godavari river. But after some research, he opted for grapes. The first experiment was with table grapes before venturing into wine grapes. Though Nashik is India's largest grape-growing region, wine grapes were not grown here. Says Samant, "Nobody had really tried before, in India, the way I had — by analysing it scientifically and doing the homework, I looked at the climate data and realised it was similar to parts of Sonoma from a grape-growing point of view." So it was back to California in the US, a territory he knew well and to Sonoma County, where he located Kerry Damskey, one of California's renowned consultant wine-makers, to help him build a winery.

Getting the settings right

The first decision, says Samant, was on the variety of grape to be grown. They decided on two white wine varieties, the Sauvignon Blanc, which is a classic from the Bordeaux region of France; and the Chenin Blanc, which is a classic from the Loire Valley, also in France. Next came the logistics. They decided to contract the grape-growing to other growers in the region thereby lending an impetus to the local rural economy.

And next on the cards was the tempering of the given climate, which was dusty and dry in summer with a monsoon between June and September. To deal with this, it was decided the grapes would be grown during winter (in Nashik, winter nights average 7-8 degrees Celsius) and hand-harvested at night in March. And also to save the new shoots after the harvest, to let it become fruiting canes for the next year's crop. Arrangements were also made to use water from a nearby lake. The grapes were first planted in 1997 with Sauvignon Blanc cuttings flown in from France and Chenin Blanc from California, and the first crush occurred in March 1999 and Sula's first wine was released in 2000.

And one of the first things he did was to create the ambience of a winegrowing region in his estates. "To make beautiful wine, you need a beautiful winery," he says. The buildings, though typical of Western Maharashtra, are also similar to Spanish architecture — whitewashed and with sloping tiled roofs.

On the estate, Samant has a ranch style, four-bedroom house. The vineyards slope down to the Gangapur lake and there are wooded hills on three sides. And the label on the Satori Merlot Red Wine, specially imported from Chile (Sula vineyards produce only white and sparkling wine), has a distinctive Sula label, a painting by artist Jaideep Mehrotra.

A challenging task

For Samant, winemaking is a challenging blend of art and science. And he has the entire winemaking process at his fingertips. He says there are at least 20 aspects to winemaking and one has to pay attention to all, right down to the packaging and labels. "It is a very capital-intensive business and all supplies have to be brought in. We import corks from Portugal, foil from Spain, yeast from Australia and barrels from France." But this is what constitutes Sula's USP — an indigenous product made with international techniques and know-how.

For the sub-tropical Indian conditions, stainless steel with chilling jackets works best, as it gives a fresh fruity and new wine, though they are considering moving to stainless steel and oak for a heavier body. The entire process from pressing to bottling would take about three weeks, as the wine goes through a gentle press for the juice, then the fermentation with yeast and three successive filtrations and finally stabilising the wine for both heat and cold.

A self-confessed aficionado of good food and wine, Samant has indeed found his niche. Despite a casually suave exterior, he seems to have a meticulous bent of mind, which has paid him his dividends. The decision to produce white wines was a well-calculated one, as it is a natural match for India's fiery cuisine. In fact, the Sula Brut, a sparkling wine, pairs well with tandoori dishes and biryani and with lighter Asian dishes such as dim sum and steamed seafood. The Sula Chenin Blanc (highly recommended) goes down well with salads and sweet-sour cuisines such as Chinese, Southeast Asian and Gujarati. Sula's Sauvignon Blanc is the perfect accompaniment to coastal and southern coconut-based curries and dishes flavoured with coriander as well as spicy Indian dishes.

As wine is very much a day-to-day affair and a part of all festivities in Europe, one cannot but ask him if he considers India a niche market. Given the population in India, 20 million is niche, he says with a smile. And in China, niche is a hundred times more, thanks to the wine boom that happened five years earlier than in India, he adds. And the statistics stand testimony to this. In 2001, Sula sold 4,000 cases and it doubled in 2002, while Samant expects it to go up to 12,000 this year.

Now touching markets in San Francisco and Italy, and favoured by the Oberoi group in their luxury Vilas chain of hotels, Rajeev Samant's valley is indeed green with the latest vintage to enter the Indian and global market.

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